New fossils from Indonesia, including the smallest humerus ever found from an adult hominin, belonged to the tiny Homo floresiensis species, researchers said.
A new study describes 700,000-year-old teeth and arm bones from one of our most enigmatic relatives: a toddler-size “hobbit” who lived on a small island between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
The study, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that the species, Homo floresiensis, sometimes nicknamed hobbits, could be even smaller than previously thought. But the results still left scientists divided over how such exceptional humans evolved.
The hobbits were first discovered 20 years ago inside the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Australian and Indonesian scientists uncovered bones and teeth, along with stone tools that were most likely used to butcher meat.
Based on those bones, the researchers estimated that Homo floresiensis stood 106 centimeters tall — about three and a half feet. More remarkable than its short stature was its minuscule brain, about one-third the size of a modern human’s. Analyzing the cave floor, scientists determined the Homo floresiensis bones were somewhere between 100,000 and 60,000 years old.
The sensational discovery left scientists struggling to fit Homo floresiensis into the family tree of humans and their extinct relatives, a group known as hominins. The oldest known hominins were short, small-brained apes. But by two million years ago, they had largely been replaced by taller hominins with much bigger brains.
Some scientists hypothesized that the bones came from humans with growth disorders. But many researchers rejected that explanation, because the anatomy of people with those growth disorders today doesn’t closely match that of the fossils.